We’ve all watched programmes like Come Dine With Me, MasterChef and Great British Bake-Off and thought to ourselves ‘I could do that’, before inevitably falling considerably short of the expected result.

Hosting a dinner party, however, doesn’t mean that you have to be a Michelin-starred chef and can rely more on your ability to make your guests smile, rather than worrying about your (lack of) cooking ability.

If this sounds like you then read on to see how you can master the art of hosting a dinner party for friends and family.

A simple, yet effective menu

Contrary to popular belief, difficult recipes are not always better. Your guests won’t care about how many hours you slaved over preparing each of the dishes, as long as it tastes good they will be happy. For this, consider what foods your guests like and what you can realistically manage to cook.

Pasta meals make for a good solution when catering to different pallets. Better yet, all that you have to do is cook a large batch of pasta, along with any other ingredients that you will be using to complete the meal, and serve as required.

Penne pasta with a helping of a creamy sauce and chopped meat such as chicken (if your guest is not vegetarian) and a sprinkling of cheese can look as good as anything served up by Marco Pierre White.

Decoration

As well as table decorations to add to the mood and atmosphere of the dinner party, if you want to impress your guests, why not try your hand at creating origami sculptures with napkins? There are many easy-to-follow instructions you can find on the web that you can try.

Alternatively, if you prefer your table decorations to be somewhat less fiddly, flower vases and candles also make for beautiful, yet traditional, centrepieces. Along with a classy tablecloth on which to lay your plates and cutlery, your dining room soon resembles a Milan restaurant.

Selection of drink

Every good dinner party needs a selection of wine (or other drinks for designated drivers and non-drinkers). Fine wine can be an expensive investment, which is why it might be better to keep a collection of wine and storing bottles in a custom-made wine rack to suit your home.

Hopefully, though, your guests will be polite enough to bring bottles of wine to the party – alternatively, you can always ask that they bring a bottle, just to be on the safe side. If your dinner party is aimed with the intentions of drinking something a little bit stronger before/during/after your meal, then definitely ask your guests to supply their own drink, otherwise this will cost more than a pretty penny.

Entertainment

After your meal, attention soon turns to entertaining your guests. How you go about this is completely up to you, but some fun and easy ideas include:

• Karaoke
• Pictionary
• Who Am I?
• Charades
• Lego Firewalk – Perfect if your children have forgotten to pack it away!
• Impressions
• Board games like Monopoly

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list but will hopefully serve as some level of inspiration. Equally, you can come up with your own party games. Just make sure that the rules are easy to follow otherwise your guests won’t know what is going on, and you’ll only end up becoming frustrated.

So that is our Dinner Party 101. Hopefully, you now feel prepared to invite the guys and girls over and show them that you are, in fact, the hostess with the mostest.

*Collaborative post